… Wonko's personal learning voyage into uncharted territories.

now sight is part of the equation when creating an environment – sound is another. I got thinking what would trigger a feeling of “not being in Kansas anymore” and reminded myself of the wonderful, convincing worlds created in my favourite sci fi movies.

tension, sense of place, disconnection with the here and now and replacement of the there and then can be achieved by an authentic experience, so I had a go at creating some music.

Now this is not new for me, but it has been a while. So I fired up my favourite modular digital synthesiser (Buzz), constructed a noise-making machine, added effects

Sound-making apparatus

and then wrote some patterns, plugged these into a sequence

Sound sequencer

and, after a little tweaking, recorded to CD-quality WAV about 5 minutes of atmospheric bubbling, throbbing and other spaced sounds. I ripped it to MP3, tagged it, uploaded it to the public object path of our virtual world and then scripted an object to play the sound on create and presto .. instant atmosphere.

Link to the original spacescape – what do you think? Does it enhance or annoy? I quite like it. It greets you at the initial world connect point. I think I shall add machine drones and other atmospherics strategically elsewhere also.